From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Dylan the Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly, you are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Twenty twenty five. As the humans reckon a calendar Tonight, folks, we're exploring a mystery, one that may be unfamiliar to many of us here in these still somewhat United States, but doubtlessly ringing a
bell or our Canadian conspiracy realist. Oh my gosh, had you guys heard of this one before we pitched it internally?
Yeah? I was Roman somewhere around the Gulf of America. Gosh, years ago.
Is that like the Gulf of Tonkin.
In that it's made up?
Yeah?
I got it.
Yeah, yeah, no, I remember. We somebody wrote us about this years ago, and I think it's something that's been flying under our radar, just as it had for years before that.
Yeah, it's a twisted tale of intrigue, big business, bad deals, a disappearance that remains unsolved today, and full disclosure, folks, it's about a very pillish, uncool guy. The question is what happened to Ambrose Small. And thank you to our Canadian conspiracy realist up north and abroad who had written to us about this before. But we talked often about strange disappearances. It was much easier for someone to disappear
back in the day, with or without their consent. But some of these cases, amid all the innumerable disappearances throughout history, some of them still resonate and haunt people today. This is a question that has been that has been thoroughly analyzed, and as we'll see, no one as of yet has proven what happened. No one has cracked the case. So we're hoping that tonight, with your help, maybe we can get a little closer to an answer.
Yeah, only one hundred and four years ago. We're gonna find these answers.
Right after a quick word from my sponsor.
You are the facts, all right, Ambrose Joseph Small eighteen eighty six. That's when he's born. No one knows what's going to happen to him? It's he's born in Bradford in modern day on Ontario. Side note, didn't know this one, you guys. Ontario used to just be called Canada West.
Oh wow, that's so funny. Man in the town I grew up, Augusta, right across the bridge in South Carolina, it's just called North Augusta, which I always found very dismissive to South Carolina.
Yeah. It also calls to mind things like West Virginia and things like North and South Dakota. There could have been other names.
I like to refer to them collectively as the Dakotas.
I call them the Carolinas if I don't know where the town is, and I'm in a conversation, and I know it's somewhere over there.
So by eighteen seventy six, the Small family had moved to modern day Toronto, and by eighteen eighty Small's father became the manager of a hotel called the Grand Hotel. It must have been a fine place.
You know, burst of humility, a little bit of a street level knowledge. Here the hotel is next to a place called the Grand and Opera House, equally humble name.
There you go with the other.
Well, and it's actually very very cool, guys, because this is a place where culture moved from the US into uh into Canada, in parts of Canada where there really was that thing that we talk about all the time, the great export of the United States culture, and it's moving north because as plays and other it's mostly plays like stage plays.
Musicals maybe as well touring circuit stuff, some Vaudeville stuff.
Yeah, it was more of Vaudeville air in the golden age of Broadway musicals. Yeah, mostly plays in Vaudeville's and probably maybe some variety.
Shows all run out of New York to your point, Matt, So now it's eighteen eighty four, Ambrose Small is still a teen and he starts working at the bar of this grand hotel. And while he's working at the bar, he runs into, of course, a lot of locals. One of those locals is a guy named Oliver B. Epperd who is the manager of the nearby Grand Opera House, and Oliver B. Shepherd, for one reason or another, really digs and bro Small as a team.
So eventually he migrated just around the way to the Grand Opera House, where he became an usher you know, one of those folks that kindly shows you to your seat, and quickly he kind of worked his way up the ranks at the Grand Opera House and became the treasurer. That's kind of a success story right there. That's a pretty high position. He was generally thought of as a pretty solid worker. Small was also from early on someone
who really made no secret about their ambitions. He was always looking for a little bit of a side hustle.
Yeah, always in search of some extra cheddar. The kind of guy who likes money so much that he gets upset when other people have it. If we're going to editorialize and profile a bit, we know that at this point he was already participating in bookie activities, illegal book making operations. A guy I love taking bets on horse races, you know, business in the front, bookie.
In the back, betting on the ponies.
Yes, yeah, let those ponies run. Got to you got to. But he experienced tragedy as well as mother passed away in eighteen eighty seven, and then in eighteen eighty nine, you know, he had a falling out with Shepherd and he left. Perhaps this was due to small sometimes prickly personality perhaps it was due to his constant pursuit of power. Like you'll see biographers who speculate that Small stab Shepherd the man who had helped him in the back metaphorically,
not literally, one way or the other. Small ends up going to work at the Toronto Opera House. So same kind of thing, different brand name.
Yeah, I went from Grand to Toronto because of whatever was going on with this Shepherd character.
And he gets promoted there as well, at the Toronto Opera House. And during this time this will be important later. His father, Small's father, a guy named Daniel, marries Josephine Corman. Josephine Corman comes from money. She's an heiress. She's the daughter of a wealthy beer baron named Ignacious, which is such a wealthy guy named.
And shout out to the Canadian Encyclopedia. How often do we get to shout out those guys, that's for sure. Yeah, I just have some of the most I don't know the best collected information about this case.
I would say they're one of the I would say they're one of the best least biased sources online. So you can read a lot of print books about this investigating the mystery and about the life of Ambrose Small. But often, and we say this with great respect, often the authors are drawing toward their own conclusion what they think happened, and the Canadian Encyclopedia newspapers at the time they're taking wild swings, especially the newspapers in the era of cutthroat muckraking press.
So Small kind of fought his way to the forefront of the super competitive theater business there in Ontario, and he eventually found a partnership with Detroit theater mogul Clark J. Whitney, who was a major player in the Ontario theater circuit. So when Whitney died in nineteen oh two, Small bought up tons of theaters and communities across Ontario and least
others to kind of create a network of theaters. And they all depended on him by his own design for booking these shows, because he was the sole controller of the kind of pathway that you mentioned, Matt, from New York to Canada, the New York kind of theater syndicates. I guess you could call them.
Well, and you may yourself. How does the manager at the Toronto Opera House have enough scratch to buy all of these properties, right, these are established businesses that cost lots and lots of money, and he is doing that because we mentioned he's a bookie. But you can only imagine that there's other stuff going on in the background too, where he's able to get enough capital to buy major establishments.
Excellent setup. Yeah. In nineteen o two, he marries the younger sister of his stepmother, So technically he marries his step aunt. And her name is Teresa Corman, And just like Josephine Corman, this is the heiress of that beer baron Ignacious.
Isn't sheilin younger step daughter or something?
Yeah? Yeah, yeah, so still technically step aunt. So yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like it's his stepmother's younger sister, so technically, right, wouldn't that be his step aunt? Yeah, So they're combined financial assets. Ambrose Small's growing control of the theater community there and maybe maybe he bet on the right ponies. Combined with Teresa Corman's inheritance or her assets from her family, they make the couple super wealthy. But money is not always going to equate to happiness,
not every time. They're very different people, like she is a polyglot, she is super into world travel. She's a philanthropist, she volunteers everywhere.
And Small, on the other hand, is a philanderer.
And a gambler, like you said, a womanizer. He even I don't know, he's a real pill. Which is interesting about this case. He had a semi secret chamber built in the Grand Opera House and it was for his tryst with chorus girls. This is the kind of guy that we're talking about in our early days of Hollywood episode. This guy would literally have young women who wanted to work with him and he would invite them to that secret room for an interview.
Casting couch types stuff.
Yeah.
Cool. It's interesting because his wife was such a you know, lover of culture and you know, the finer things in life, and like you said, very well traveled, and he seemed to be very much a part of culture and importing it to Canada. And it would seem like, I mean, I didn't know the guy, but that he was more concerned about the financial side of it than he was you know, the beauty of the arts.
Yeah, it is weird. According to some of the sources, we found that secret room there in the Opera House for the tryst chamber or whatever we want to call it.
It is.
It isn't found at least according to some sources until the investigation begins that we're going to explain to you or we're going to talk about. But others it's like rumors, right, that are just circulating around the office basically, and the various offices of all of these opera houses and places of performance. But the guy is definitely viewed. It would seem ken according to some of the information that comes out during the era of yellow journalism, that this guy is a bit of a scoundrel.
Yeah again, a pill. It is an open secret, right, It's something that his wife seems to be very much aware of. Now. The small family, Teresa and Ambrosewiming, they live in opulence. They have a very nice est state, but they sleep in separate rooms and they appear to only grow further apart as small pursues, you know, this gambling, this philandering and success as an entertainment mogul. Eventually he runs what we could rightly call an empire of thirty
four theaters half or outside of Ontario. So he's expanding. Any star performer who wants to wants to stroll the boards at his stage. No matter how popular they are. This control of the market means they have to in some way deal with Ambrose small and Small has a reputation, he does it. He's not just ruthless and unscrupulous, which happens a lot with moguls. He seems to take sadistic joy in screwing people over. We got to talk about the business contract thing.
Yeah, I mean it's funny you mentioned the whole Golden Age of Hollywood episode that we did in terms of the casting couch. But his iron fisted grasp over this market and also perhaps sadistic bent also has a lot in common with the studio system of those days that we talk about in the episode. So everyone thought the Small wasn't just a scoundrel, as you mentioned, Ben, they also knew that he took great pleasure and pride in
putting one over on just about anybody. He planted business contracts with little kind of hidden clauses that he called jokers, that essentially were ways of kind of hiding in plain sight things that would benefit him and not benefit the person signing the contract. He was also suspected of using his influence to actually fix some of these horse races, yeah, which was totally possible, just to be clear.
And also yeah, people called him at chiseler, which was a big insult at the time. They called him at cheapskate. They they did not like him. It reminds me of that movie. It is an interesting comparison. It reminds me of that film based on the real life event I want to see. It was a small town somewhere in Texas where there was a known bully who eventually got killed and everybody knew who killed him but refused to go to the police.
Yep, movie is called Bully.
Oh it's a bully, ok. Larry Clark.
Yeah, it's a gnarly film, not for the faint of heart. It's it's pretty mean spirited.
Stumbled it to the answer. Yeah, this guy was unpopular. A lot of people hated him. There's something mentioned. I believe this isn't the Canadian encyclopedia. It's repeated in several different places about a quote from a journalist in Toronto at the time named Hector charles Worth. Hector Charlesworth knows small personally, and in nineteen twenty eight, after the events that we're about to really explore, here the stuff they
don't want, you know. Hector comes out with a book called More Candid Chronicles and he says, if I heard once, I heard a score of times the ominous words. Somebody will get to Amby someday.
Right.
They called him Amby as a nickname for Ambrose. I don't know if he liked the nickname Amby. Even his longtime assistants did not care for him. Guy named John Dody Jack to his friends, worked for this guy for years, and he also seemed to hate the dude, which will be important later.
So let's talk about movie theaters. These are performance arts theaters, many of the ones that Small has taken over and is now running, and he has such control over them. As we stated before, it's about the players, the actual human beings that are going to get on stage. I assume also it's the players who are going to be underneath the stage, maybe the musicians. Right, He probably is exerting control over everybody that is going to take part
in any kind of performance in these venues. And we're talking thirty four or more of them as well, all across Toronto in different parts of Canada. In eighteen ninety six, the First movie theater shows up in Toronto. Now that is a while ago, right, If if we're following through the timeline here, which we're in, I guess we're in what the nineteen teens at this point something like that. Around this time, the concept of movie theaters is a threat to his business and his way of life, and
it's kind of been looming in the background. But it's been this technology that has been advancing pretty quickly and growing a lot, especially to the south. Right in the United States, movie theaters are becoming the thing, and as they are now proliferating across Canada. Small things. Maybe there's something else I need to do here, Maybe there's a pivot I can make to either cash out or change my wealth, change the way I make my wealth.
Yeah. Yeah. To be clear, we don't have a sense that this guy was necessarily a creative participant in the entertainment industry. Like he was not writing his own plays, right, he was not doing a Kevin Costner thing where he directs and stars and stuff. He is about the money. So whatever can accelerate his personal wealth is what he will look into. The rise of motion pictures sends live theater into decline, and so it comes to pass. In
nineteen nineteen, Small decides to exit the business. He's going to sell out. You know, this is like if you run AMC and you decide to sell AMC. And so he says, I'm going to sell my theater Empire to a competing force, trans Canada Theaters Limited over in Montreal. And he says, I got to get the right price, though,
I got to get my big So he sells. In nineteen nineteen, he strikes a deal to sell off his entire business for one point the US equivalent of one point seven million dollars one million dollars up front, the other seven hundred thousand in installments over time. If we want to pull a ridiculous history card and do a little inflation calculator, that is thirty million, eight hundred and twenty four thousand, nine hundred and thirty dollars and sixty four cents in twenty twenty four money.
Oof, my goodness, that is a lot of cash. Then on the first of December nineteen nineteen, at the law offices of Osler, Hoskin and Harcourt in the Dominion Bank building on King Street, Small, Theresa and their attorney E. W. M. Flock met Trans Canada Theaters representative William Shaughnessy. It's a great theater man name to sign over those theaters. They got a check for a million dollars. The check was deposited at that bank Dominion the next morning, perhaps by
Small but also possibly by Teresa. Then on December twod he vanished.
So what happened? We'll dive into it after a word from our sponsor, here's river did's increase to this day? No one knows, at least by which we mean, no one has an official solution to the case. Again, as I stated earlier, there are a lot of opinions right. There are things that initial investigators were convinced would solve the case. There are things that later authors and researchers are convinced they have discovered. We want to be fair to all of them. But you'll see what we mean
when we delve into the theories. So maybe maybe we step it back forensically into the day of the disappearance December second, nineteen nineteen. Now no one is one hundred percent sure of the exact timeline here, and honestly that's typical for cases of this nature. We know that after making this sale after getting the initial million dollars just crazy money. Ambrose small, however distant he and his spouse may have been. He made some purchases, ostensibly for her,
some kind of celebratory gifts. He bought her jewelry, a fur coat, a Cadillac that's pretty nuts. And then he had lunch with the guy who mentioned earlier in Noel Flock, and with his wife Teresa, and he walked Esa to a nearby orphan because she regularly volunteered at this orphanage. And then he went back to his office with his buddy Flock. They were having a meeting and they planned to get out around five point thirty, at which point they would maybe go and meet up for dinner. Flock
had a train to catch to London. Side note for US Yankees in the crowd, that's London, Ontario. If anybody's wondering, WHOA, that's amazing a train from Canada to London. We thought so too, but it's not. So we know then that Flock is gone. He's off to London, Ontario, and his train leaves at six pm, so he leaves at five point thirty, which makes him the last person that we can confirm on record saw Ambrose small. After that, the trail runs cold, or the trail is actually cold, but
no one knows about it for two weeks. His own family does not report him missing until two weeks have passed. It's not till December sixteenth, And I got to ask you, guys, what's the implication there? Does his wife think he's just off with a mistress. Maybe do a lot of associates just say, hey, he made it, you know, he got the golden goose. He's kicking back as a newly minted millionaire. Or did the people who not like him, were they just happy not to hear from him.
It's one of two things. Either his wife was aware that he does this kind of thing, especially when he's got a windfall, goes and spends some of it and spends his time with other women, if not his mistress, because he did have one longtime mistress that his wife was aware of, unfortunately, because she had found some letters
and some other things from that specific person. But she knew he spent his time with other women, and she knew that he liked to gamble and he liked to be away, So maybe she just thought he was out of town doing his thing, and she was either embarrassed about that or has just gotten so used to that that that's just what she deals with, right right.
I think she was even aware of his casting couch situation. Yes, whether it was completely against her will or whether they had some sort of understanding or whatever, I think is maybe not fully clear. But she was aware of his patterns and didn't report him missing to the police because just figured he was out catting around.
Or or she specifically didn't talk about him and his disappearance for two weeks because stuff had to get done, okay.
Which is yeah, like as always saying earlier, there are a lot of places there, there are a lot of possibilities that might not involve her as a culprit, right, we have to remember this, Ley's been through a pretty tough marriage. I do think it's worth noting that when investigators do ask her when the family goes public on sixteenth of December nineteen nineteen, investigators do ask Teresa Small about this, and she says she had not reported his
disappearance because she wanted to avoid a scandal. She had this specific statement that is in the papers of the time. It's quoted in every source pretty much. She says, I believe my Ambi is in the hands of a designing woman somewhere and will come back. And this just a side note for us here in the US. This finally explains to me the double meaning, the double entendre of that sitcom from back in the day designing women, because they were a crew of interior designers or.
But they were also you know, the amorous Yes, but that's just as I was saying earlier, I think this is potentially a statement you would say if you're trying to cover your tracks because maybe you did something wrong.
I'm just saying, and we're taking people at their word, that's all. That's all I was saying.
Yeah, And I'm just saying that these are different possibilities, man like, like there's no proof, there's no smoking gun. Maybe she was waiting for a two week time window. But the disappearance does go public. And when it goes public, what does what does Teresa Small do? She offers a reward.
Yes, five hundred dollars I believe, which at the time would have been no small reward. I guess we better inflation calculator that too. While we're at it.
Oh, yes, sir, that is going to five hundred dollars US equivalency in nineteen nineteen, Well would be nine thousand, sixty six dollars and sixteen cents in twenty twenty four.
Well, she should have gone for an even five oh four to make it an even ten grand and twenty twenty four numbers. You know what was she thinking? No, but this was a big deal. This was the kind of money that would get things done. Yeah.
Yeah, And this is not for returning him, right, this is information on his whereabouts. In addition to the five hundred dollars reward. I believe she has missing persons flyers distributed across Canada and across the United States. And the investigators welcome this. They need the help. Honestly, they're flummoxed. Everything they're looking at for this guy, at least again, as you were saying, according to what the investigators say,
according to their word, is a dead end. He has im packed any suitcases, by which they mean none of the suitcases he previously possessed are missing. It doesn't seem like he pulled that million dollars out of the bank. There's no track record or no trail, I should say of him using a check to pay for a train ticket or to get a hotel somewhere. They go to the usual spots he hangs out at, including we can only imagine some of his gambling connections. He's not there.
No one there is speaking to the police. And I guess, to be fair, the police burst into a gambling hall or a den of iniquity, people aren't going to say, oh, yeah, yeah, that guy was here. They're just not going to talk to the authorities in general.
Well, especially if it's the big spender of that establishment. Right, if it's one of the bosses that hangs out of that establishment, you're never going to speak a word about that person and what they're doing.
It's just bad business.
Yeah, you got to reward your loyal customers, right, they do. To that note about the longtime mistress, we know of, authorities reach out to Clara Smith. Clara Smith is living in Minneapolis in nineteen nineteen, and she says, look, I don't know what happened to Aby. I'm over here in Minneapolis, and they could prove that she was there, so maybe did they surveil her, right, maybe he was hiding out or something like that. That's a valid question at this point, Well.
This dude is a serious public figure in this scene at this point, correct. I mean he is a player, so he's known, and this would not have gone unnoticed. This was a pretty big news item.
Yeah, yeah, the big thing to notice here in this story. Nothing is missing besides the man. It's not as though the money was taken out, right. He wasn't walking around with a million dollars. He wasn't even walking around with a couple hundred thousand dollars. He was just gone.
Vanish, as if into thin air. Look, this is to the point you were making. This is such a public figure. This is kind of like Harvey Weinstein going missing. Even though his I'm going to say it, doubtlessly he coerced some women, right, even though that may not be front of mind for the public sphere or the press at the time. It's unescapable or inescapable reality. All sorts of rumors pop up. Eventually, Teresa Small increases the reward for
information to fifty thousand dollars if found alive. Fifteen thousand just for the body of Ambrose Small. The story goes global. This guy's the Elvis Presley of his time, or the Bigfoot if you like. There are all sorts of people claiming that they have seen him. People were claiming they were using their psychic powers or pseudo scientific powers to be the last hope to find this guy, and none of these things worked. Do we want to talk about Arthur Conan Doyle.
He shows up in this Oh yes, mister Sherlock Holmes himself.
Yeah, that's just a side note. You can read more about it. But he's reporters in again this muckraking era of newspapers. They reach out to other celebrities. This becomes a celebrity story and they say, hey, will you help the Canadian police find Ambrose small.
Right, And that included a Viennese criminologist by the name of mac Similian A. Langsner. He had a method that I'm with pat or trademarked or whatever, but that's a pretty cool name. It's called the thought wave system that he believed could help locate this person. It sounds like a bit of quackery to me. Yeah.
The thought wave system, whatever the efficacy may be, did not work in this regard. And, as often happens in a case of this magnitude, multiple people from across Canada and the US and later the world started claiming to have seen Small And some of these were claims made in good faith for sure, some were made for attention, all were apparently incorrect. There were also people claiming that they were in fact Ambro Small. They were coming forward. It maybe was I don't know, maybe it was all
the money on the line. What do you guys think had to be I mean.
Like I said that five hundred bucks and you know it was enough to get stuff done. What I'm saying is like this would have been a massive motivator, all of these top people showing up trying to get on the publicity wagon. It just seems like if something was going to be found, that there was something out there at clue of any kind, that it would have turned up. Well.
Yeah, and once it became fifty thousand dollars going on, that's like lobbery.
And that five hundred turning into fifty thousand, five hundred already being a mega respectable reward. You would think that if there was something out there to be found, with all of these top people coming in to jump on the publicity wagon, it was going to be found.
Yeah, there were so many false claims, including people who said I am Ambrose small, very like I am Spartacus. They eventually the Attorney General keeps a folder for all these reports they don't take seriously, and they called it letters from cranks, Comma, et cetera. This search is initially, yes, aided by newspapers, but I think we can make a
strong argument it's only partially aided by newspapers. In this mad rush to grab headlines to grab attention, just like a precedent of social media today, there were a lot of unscrupulous public They were super happy to print any and all outrageous claims because if you got the right headline, you sold the paper and they bought that instead of you know, your competitor's news outfit. So newspaper readers also got Can we talk about the cryptogram? I'm still so
confused about this. How would we pronounce this? Would it be one p eb eighty six.
And sounds like an aim handle?
You got no idea?
This is I can't remember if this mentioned in every source, but in the Toronto Star if you if you look at their reporting of this, apparently there was this cryptogram that was released to newspaper readers and people were invited to analyze it, and so a bunch of people tried to crack the cipher and the going public opinion was that this meant Ambrose Small was alive, but he was trapped in a limehouse kill there a place called Brampton Junction, and he was suffocating as you read this paper to.
The cryptogram was just something that was sent by some kind of crank that I was just trying to get some attention.
There's a book that I'm hoping to read by Katie Dobbs, who wrote for the Toronto Star. It will hopefully have more about the cryptogram, but we're honestly going to have to dig into that.
One.
Book's called The Missing Millionaire, The True Story of Ambrose Small.
Yeah, and in full disclosure. I don't think any of us have read that in full yet.
Okay, not yet.
So this cryptogram spelled spelled like it sounds, it leads nowhere and this is where we get to. I don't know if we want to talk about some of the weird alleged sightings. One that stands out is the work of a private detective named John J. Brothy And pardon my cat there, everybody say hey to doctor.
Vankmin Hey, doctor V. Looking good.
So this guy brought He says, Look, I found Small and I found him doing poorly as they would say at the time. This is nineteen twenty one. He says, this guy, the real Ambrose Small, was a victim of a hit and run in Des Moines, Iowa. And he was dropped off by the person who had hit him. So someone hit this guy in the road and then they dropped him off and left. And this PI says Small or the guy he believes as small as a
gunshot wound in his neck. He's got a crazy concussion and both his legs have been amputated.
Yeah, like, what could that have been from? Was he in war? Did he hop a train incorrectly?
Yes, I've never heard that put quite like that, Matt, I love it.
And apparently this guy is non responsive, at least nonverbal for three weeks, so the better part of a month. And when he finds speaks up, he says, I am John Dowdy. I came here from Obaha. That is all I remember. Oh yeah, we remember though the name John Dowdy or Jack to his friends, the longtime assistant slash secretary of Ambrose.
Small oh, James, right, yeah.
James, that's correct. Sorry, I just called him Jack because we're friends.
Of course, so we should hold onto this. Put a pin in this fact for a little later, and we'll see as well why this couldn't possibly have been the truth. So moving forward in the timeline, the private investigator claimed he showed this this man very unfortunate case, a photograph of Ambrose Small, and the man allegedly replied, yes, that is me.
Okay, we'll switch of the story.
There's like a Memento man type situation, you know.
Yeah, sorry, I'm editorializing when I'm pointing that out. The guy does get taken into custody in Des Moines, we know that for sure, but we also know from that point the trail falls cold. All we can assume is that this very troubled individual was not in fact the missing theater Agne. Because there's no other real reporting about them, and despite all of this kerfuffle, this bruhaha, no one can find the actual Ambrose Small. None of the people
claiming to be Ambrose Small turned out to be Ambrose Prime. Further, no one can find a solid lead or a clue that goes anywhere. And because there are no solid leads because there are no solid clues. There are these wild rumors, theories, speculation, these people. As I mentioned, I think I keep mentioning it too much, but I just can't imagine. I have a difficult time imagining deciding to go to the media or to police and saying that you are the missing person.
It reminds me a little bit of those unscrupulos as crazy scams where people would say they were a missing kid would be gone for years. You know. Also, maybe there's mental instability involved, and maybe some people just begin to believe that they are, in fact Ambrose Small. That's the magnitude of this case.
Well, Ambrose is still missing, but the question remains, was there foul play? We'll return after a word from our sponsor and explore that very thought.
And we're back. So why don't we start by jumping into some theories and a handful of suspects. Theory number one we've alluded to quite a few times already, and certainly seems credible that Small ran off with one of his many lady friends paramoors. Unfortunately, each lead in that particular genre turned out to not hold water. If he did leave with one of his ladies was someone completely
unknown or unsuspected to police. In addition to Small's friends, quote unquote, his circle of associates, let's call them.
Yeah, I'm calling circle of associates because I'm not sure if they would consider each other friends, you know what I mean, based on the infamy of his business dealings. The second theory is murder by employee, the guy we've mentioned before, James Jack Doty, who I'm mistakenly called John a second ago, but we introduced him at the top.
He was their primary suspect. He's the first person they look at because Dottie has worked with Small for years, and Dottie is often complaining to his friends, because he does have friends. He's complaining about his salary. He says, my salary is let me put it in an extremely diplomatic way. He tells people his salary is insufficient. And he makes something like I want to say, forty bucks a week, forty three something like that.
Well, yeah, and he does a lot of work, a guy who makes a lot of money, and he likely watches his boss do all kinds of unscrupulous things, knowing that he's making money in other ways. And he still gets paid that much.
Yeah, and he's feeling like a dog's body, which is just a fancy word for pretty much a servant or a man of all needs, you know, like a valet, a secretary. He's a fixer, and he feels unappreciated, and you know, everybody feels unappreciated at some point. But this went on for years for this guy. And initially the police, well they can't get Jack's opinion because Jack disappears pretty much right after Ambrose is gone.
Uh oh, that seems suspicious.
Yeah, not the best thing to do. Really.
Well, Well, he just went on vacation, just like Ambrose.
Right, sure, why not? And when he went on vacation, he took a lot more money than Ambrose appeared to take, because Dowdy made off with the equivalent of one hundred thousand to one hundred and five thousand US dollars worth of victory bonds from the Ambrose small safety deposit over at Dominion Bank, which you mentioned earlier.
Nor is this World War One victory bonds?
Stealing victory bonds? That feels I mean, I guess it was a different time, you know what I mean?
Now, Hold on, guys, correct me if I'm wrong here. Those victory bonds. Let's say Daughtry. It's such a weird doug h t Y Dotty.
Don't you keep saying Dotty or dough Yeah.
Sorry, there's another person in the story like Doughty or it's very close and my brain keeps like smashing them together. But this guy takes these victory bonds, right, Those bonds have to mature before you can cash them out, right, or maybe you can cash them out. They're just not worth what they would be.
They haven't matured.
Yeah, so I guess you would just hold on to them and is a long game.
Or maybe he thought it was different from just taking cash. Or maybe he opened the safety deposit box because he did have access to it and just took what he found. That might be a maybe more opportunistic. But this is our second disappearance, and in the wake of the second disappearance,
investigators learn more troubling stuff about Jack. According to what are loosely called informants, Jack had multiple times spoken of what it would be like if he kidnapped or murdered Ambrose small Now where they just mad at each other after a business dealing. Was he, you know, rubbed raw about something and said I wish I could just you know, strangle this guy or something, or did he have an actual plan? Either way, it doesn't look great. He's a
person of interest. You have to talk to him, definitely. He's a guy you need to reach out and touch exactly, and anyone could get touched, right. We know that's for sure in this case. Because the law does catch up to Jack. He's not in London, Ontario, he's not in Toronto. He is arrested in Oregon on charges of theft and conspiracy to kidnap Small, but not on murder, just to you.
Know, hang on to him for a while, as he had said earlier, which again, don't say that stuff out loud, please.
The kidnapping charges were eventually dropped because of lack of evidence, and he wasn't able to be charged with the murder because no one had confirmed Small's death in the first place. He was still simply missing.
Yeah, and he went away for six years. I want to say he was extradited to Canada. Again, a crime solved. That's a good thing, the theft of the bonds. But this does not solve the disappearance. And police become convinced over the course of their investigation that Jack could not have done this. The Jack is not the prime mover of Ambrose Small's disappearance, which leads us to the third theory. Sometimes it's the one's closest to you who betray you. Right.
What if his family did it? What about his wife? Right? And they're what seems to be, by many accounts, an unhappy marriage. Ambrose Small has sisters, Gertrude and Florence. They are the initial proponents who say, we think our sister in law pay to have our brother killed.
It's kind of whoa whoa, I.
Mean awkward Thanksgiving labor for sure.
Yeah, well, that's one of the primary things in any investigation. Who benefits from this person no longer being here or from this person being dead? Right? The primary beneficiary in this situation would be the spouse because all of that money just got deposited into their accounts, right, A million dollar check got deposited and then he goes missing immediately afterwards. That's it's just suspicious. And if this person, this other person Jack high tailed it with a bunch of money
as well that was also his, that's weird. It does make you wonder if it wasn't some kind of maybe a combo meal.
Right, Yeah, because Jack doubtlessly knew Teresa. Right, Yeah, that's inescapable and it's proven. Yeah, Gertrude and Florence are convinced that, or they are convinced enough. They clearly seem to believe this enough that they pony up some of their own funds and they hire a private detective named Patrick Sullivan. Patrick Sullivan is solid at his detective work, we could argue, but he's even better at getting press. He loves pr a good headline. He does not find any trace of
Ambrose Small that we know of. But along the way, he's talking to every reporter that he can put get on the horn, you know, everybody he can button a hole into talking about this, and he's publishing in these tabloids, in these what we call yellow journalist rags, where he's
accusing multiple people. Sometimes he's saying, well, it might be the Catholic church who Adam kidnapped because they hate theater or whatever, or the reason the police can't find this guy is because the police killed him and they're pretending to look for him and now they're covering it up. So this is the kind of stuff you see in you know, a lot of talk shows or different even podcasts today, that kind of speculation. None of it led anywhere, Oh.
Yeah, but the way he talked about it, he ended up in a bunch of lawsuits himself, a bunch of libel, obscenities stuff that he trouble for it, because again, that type of writing in papers was so common, but the law was catching up on. This is what happens when you say clearly false things in newspapers about public folks or the Catholic church.
Right right, which was a big deal then and still is a big deal today. And it's similar to the earlier investigation of the assistant. The police eventually say, all right, Teresa's small didn't have it in her character right to murder her husband herself, but we are still concerned she may have hired some unseemly gents to do the.
Deed, which certainly seems in line with her station, you know, I mean, being a moneyed and cultured person certainly wouldn't be the one to wield the knife herself. And probably, you know, even if she didn't know unscrupulous characters directly, there's a guy for that, you know, there's people around. If you're powerful and have enough money to spend, you can find someone who will help you, the right people to do the job.
You'll know someone who knows someone. Yes, yeah, and there. This is a serious thing. There's a valid line of questioning. Still, after investigation, law enforcement says, we don't think it's her. She is never convicted of any crime related to the disappearance of Ambrose Small, which leads us to our fourth theory, back to the racetrack.
That's right, what if Small, who was famously a philandering pill and a degenerate gambler, And finally, you know made enemies are the wrong people. Let's not forget that newspaper writer quote was saying, one day someone's gonna get amby, whether it be a business partner, someone he had wronged financially.
More likely, though, once you get into the unseemly world of professional betting and bookmaking, that's when people will actually come for you, and maybe you know, decap you to start, give you a little bit of time, but then if you don't pay its curtains.
I've seen peaky blinders world, just like.
Wearing the hat. Now we're big fans.
Exactly, but The whole point is like that it could be anybody in that world, because we already stated at the top there he was using his wealth and influence in that world to fix racing. So if somebody, the wrong person loses enough money, uh, in one of those scenarios, you could have a real problem on your hands. And if you make enemies of the wrong folks in that realm uh. We've mentioned before how expensive it is to keep horses and to train horses to race like that
and to you know, be in that world. It is expensive.
Not to mention the fact that he was capable of fixing these races, which I don't even fully then you mentioned is doable. I guess it would have to do with injuring a horse or something, or having a jockey that was, you know, on your payroll who perhaps you know hold back is that the idea.
Get that horse through the jockey.
That makes it a little more sense. But what if he fixed the wrong race and you know it, it deprived somebody of some serious money, Even if it wasn't him owing money, you know that that could have happened as well.
Or what if you just what if you just betrayed somebody else in the entertainment business, and I'm also very powerful. These things could happen. The reason we include this speculation with no hard proof is because it is possible. It's it's very possible. We know that similar situations have occurred
in the past. So could he have could he have just pushed the envelope too far and gone off the deep end, like literally murdered and tossed away in a ravine somewhere for gambling debts, Or could someone have thought, you know, this guy screwed me over so much, I'm not going to let him have a happy ending with his one point seven million dollars, right, And you know then, as now, law enforcement does often have a very difficult
time investigating the real powerful people. And the really powerful people aren't the ones cavorting on stage, right, The really powerful people are the ones who owned the stage. Or what's that old Chris Rock quote about rich versus wealthy, Like the star athlete and your favorite sports team is rich, but the guy who signs his checks is wealthy. So the idea then would be that maybe law enforcement got stonewalls.
You know, maybe there was some kind of some kind of cover up, some kind of conspiracy from the wrong person in the world of gambling or organized crime, or even the world of entertainment. But there's the fifth theory, which may be a little happier, maybe a little Shawshank redemption esque. What a small squirreled away another nest egg of money that no one knew about, and he skipped down, you know what I mean, It was easier to skip town back then. We just shave your mustache or whatever.
I wanted a fresh star. He was gonna live a new life where he wasn't a total jerk. Doubtful.
Maybe people can turn over a new leaf. I mean that one's possible, but I don't know if it fits what we know about his psychological profile. It's a guy who loves money, right, loves money. What would compel you to willingly leave a million dollars and the chance of another seven hundred thousand dollars.
Behind unless he had more money, like black market money squirreled away somewhere else. I mean, that's really the only reason, right, And maybe he would feel okay about leaving his wife that large sum of money that's going to continue. There's another well, at the time, the equivalent of seven hundred thousand dollars that would be doled out to her over the course of however, many years right to that deal.
So my wife is all set. Now I've got all this other money that's way more actually, and I'm going to go do my thing. I can imagine that. Yeah, ye.
Possibly. The think is none of these theories have been conclusively proven even now in twenty Oh my gosh, you guys, I did it. I put twenty twenty four instead of twenty twenty five.
Yeah, it's okay, it happens.
Has that happened to you guys? Yet?
Oh? Yeah, for sure, there wasn't. The Supreme Court in all, the Supreme Court of Ontario at least.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nineteen twenty three, time passes, they say, okay, for legal purposes, we're gonna have to say it. We're going to call it he is dead, which means that we will enact his will as it stands on record, and the will leaves most of his estate to his wife, Teresa Small. Fast forward to nineteen thirty five. Again, never convicted of anything, she passes away.
After the estate was rated for all those back taxes that were owed. Most of the remaining funds went to various Catholic charities. The Toronto Police, however, officially closed the small case in nineteen sixty, almost half a century after the initial disappearance.
Yeah, that's an important point to note, right, because as student listeners, we'll all hear that weird discrepancy. Nineteen twenty three declared dead, nineteen sixty, case closed. That's a long time window.
Isn't it weird to have the case closed and still not have an answer. That's a little weird. Yeah, case is still open.
I didn't think you're supposed to close cases unless you found out you've done it.
You just call them cold, right, But they closed it, and as a result, people have still been speculating about this over time. In fact, there have been calls for reinvestigations, new investigations. I mean, we know there was a second investigation in nineteen thirty six that also went nowhere. That was part of the impetus to declare the case closed in nineteen sixty. You can see countless again magazine articles,
some great books. Even there was a play in twenty twenty two that I don't think any of us have seen, but I'm very curious to see what it what it entails. Or what conclusions it draws. There is one thing though, There's one piece we have to mention, right, it's the letter from Reuter's not the news organization from Ruder.
Yeah, maybe it is Reuter. I don't know.
I like saying Reuter. Just yeah, yeah, it makes a joke, it makes sense.
But it also looks like it looks like, yeah, this is weird. This is a letter that allegedly came through that had had some information in it. It was allegedly pinned by the wife, right by Teresa, allegedly, and it was basically a deathbed confession.
Yeah. I'll read a little bit of it if I could. Poor Ambrose was killed on December second, nineteen nineteen. And I know that part of his body, the trunk, was buried in the Rosedale Ravine dump and other parts of the body were burned in the Grand Opera House furnace. This is very specific.
Mm hmm.
It continues, You will be surprised, my dear Florence.
And Gertrude, that the sisters, right.
The sisters of Ambrose Small. You will be surprised, my dear Florence and Gertrude, to learn that I am more responsible for your brother's death, God forgive me, Reuter Comma the news agency. No, that last part, that last Comma part is not true, but the but I thought it was worth the joke. So this comes out after Teresa's small passes away, and this is coming from Ambrose's small sister, Florence, the person at least the way they identify in the letter, the way it's signed is just again Reuter.
Yeah, it's very weird. And in the the concept here is that after Teresa is dead, this letter would prove that Teresa had something to do with the death of a Ambrose, or at least was involved in some way, so that the sisters now should be fully in control or be the beneficiaries of other monies that were out there. Even though most of the money in the fortune there, as we said before, was given away to Catholic charities
and was tied up in legal stuff. The thought was that the sisters came up with this idea and forged a letter they would say that kind of thing. That's the speculation, the speculation about it, guys. I want to go back to the combo meal. What if, please, what if the secretary who is there suffering through every day with Ambrose right as he states, you know, I can't believe I'm having to do all this stuff for so
little money. For this guy's doing all this crap. I don't like him at all, but I need this job. I got to do this check Dowdy. Then you got the wife who is living at the house. Oh my gosh, I can't believe I'm living with this guy. I know we have this business partnership, you know, marriage thing going on, but I know all the stuff he's doing and the way he treats me and all this other stuff. Don't you think those two wouldluded some kind of trauma bond
that we mentioned before in other episodes. Don't you think maybe there's something in there where the two of them conspire to, uh, you know, take the money basically after that huge windfall.
I don't know, Matt, I think that's a pretty pretty solid alternative theory.
Well, when what what is the secretary doing when he's in his Heidi hole that he made, you know, for his trysts or whatever. Maybe he's at the house with Teresa just and again that's all complete utter bs speculation on my part, but I can just imagine the two of them being closer than soult.
Yeah, I'll play these reindeer games further. What if like, what if you say, Okay, for a big enough payoff, I'll sacrifice six years of my life in the pen. You know people have cracked that deal before.
Sure.
Well, and he was just trying to get away to the US. He was in Oregon.
But like, I don't know, Yeah, I'm saying, but that that could explain to the speculation. That could explain why he didn't squeal because he thought he would be made whole toward the end of Uh, toward the end of the conspiracy. Uh. These these are great questions. And yes, folks, we know law enforcement at the time was asking these questions as well. But whatever they found, they did not go forward with it, right, They did not release an
official conclusion. And that leads us to ask the question we asked at the beginning, what happened to Ambrose Small? There are tons of people who, for one reason or another, are certain they've cracked the case. But despite all the investigations over over decades, decades, decades, no one has universally agreed on anything.
Well, do we do we feel like this deathbed confession is sincere or Is this just another bit of a kind of smoke.
That's a great question, and it's it's tough. You know, at some point it's almost like a rorshack because they didn't have the same forensic methods available. Now, you know, like if this came out this we're twenty or post two thousand case, people will be checking DNA, right, that's the reality of it. It reminds me of our earlier conversation we had about DNA found on the belongings of a victim of Jack the Ripper. Right now we ask about
chain of custody. Was this kept sacra saying that might interfere? We know that nothing yet has led us closer to figuring out the truth, unless that is, you have a lead, fellow conspiracy realist. If so, what a coincidence, because we have an email address and a telephone number and ways to contact us online.
That's right. You can find us at the handle conspiracy Stuff where it exists all over the internet. On Facebook, we have a Facebook group Here's where it gets crazy. On YouTube, we have video content color for your perusing enjoyment. And on x FKA, Twitter, on Instagram and TikTok. For the time being, we are conspiracy stuff show. If you wish to contact us as individual human beings, you may do so. I am on Instagram at how now Noel Brown and Bolin How about yourself? Ah?
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Uh?
Just want to point out guys. For Monster the Zodiac Killer, we interviewed this author and historian Peter Vronsky about the Zodiac case. He is from Canada and specifically has written a book titled The Disappearance of Ambrose Small case closed. Huhh And I just didn't even think about that until I stumbled upon his book in research for this episode. So shout out to Peter Vronsky and check out his socials. That's vr o n Sky. Yeah. Hey, we also have a phone number. If you want to call us, our
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